Manufactured products are generally held within containers while transporting the products from a departure location to a destination location. To develop a part-packaging configuration for a plurality of parts within a container, industrial and packaging engineers generally use a “best guess” methodology and manually align physical parts/assemblies in the container. However, manually aligning a plurality of parts at different positions and orientations in a plurality of containers is labor-intensive and time consuming. Further, an optimal packaging design may not be obtained utilizing this manual methodology which results in containers being used that hold fewer than an optimal number of parts.
Further, the containers generally hold dunnage therein for further supporting the manufactured parts within the containers. Industrial and packaging engineers generally manually develop the dunnage design for holding a part. Thus, the current design process for developing the dunnage design is labor-intensive and time consuming.
Still further, during the packaging design, packaging engineers do not currently have the ability to quickly determine and reduce transportations costs associated with a packaging design. Thus, the resultant packaging design may result in relatively high transportation costs that are not determined until extremely late in a life-cycle of a manufactured part.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system, method and storage medium for determining an optimal packaging design for a container and for reducing and/or minimizing transportation costs associated with the packaging design.